The Pentagon is a larger organization which does have long-term goals around increasing it’s budget and preventing it’s budget from being reduced. It also has long-term goals around keeping certain parts of what it does secret that are threatened by DOGE sniffing around.
The Pentagon isn’t deep state, it’s just state.
So if I could prove that this is not just sloppy but intentional to reduce information being revealed to congressional inquiries and Freedom of Information Act requests, that would convince you and be a reason to update for you?
It would be interesting, sure. I can imagine some of these examples being cases of clandestine communication—as in, you want to say something that you know is illegal, you say it off the record in some channel that isn’t monitored. I think it will probably vary case by case when that is the reason though, especially given that if you were doing that you’d still want to use secure channels, just private ones, and some of these instead were ridiculously insecure.
It’s not what “I call Deep State” it’s the criteria you proposed.
So what do you call Deep State? If you mean just “all the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus has in fact inertia and internal politics and does not immediately swerve at the whim of a new elected official” I say, yeah, no shit, that is true, it has been true throughout all of recorded history in every state entity to ever exist, and even better, it’s a feature, not a bug, as far as I’m concerned. While the downside is that it’ll slow down policies I’d like, it also has a healthy dampening effect against take-over risks. If that wasn’t the case then installing a dictatorship would be a lot easier.
With Clinton’s email server motivations are pretty unclear. If we take Signalgate, using Signal is one choice you can make because you are lazy. Setting the chat to auto-delete after a few weeks is a choice that suggests the intention to avoid the communication becoming a problem later.
New evidence suggests that Dr. Fauci may have used his personal email account to communicate about official government business during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an email from Dr. Fauci’s Senior Advisor — Dr. David Morens — to disgraced EcoHealth Alliance, Inc. (EcoHealth) President Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. Morens states “I can either send stuff to Tony on his private gmail, or hand it to him at work…He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.” In a separate email, Dr. Morens references a “secret back channel” that he would use to communicate with Dr. Fauci outside the public eye. When asked about Dr. Fauci’s use of personal email to evade the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Dr. Morens concerningly testified “I may have.” This new evidence raises additional, serious concerns about public health officials purposefully concealing information and behaving as if they are unaccountable to the American people they serve.
[...]
Earlier this year, the Select Subcommittee released evidence that Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Senior Advisor at NIAID — Dr. David Morens — deleted federal COVID-19 records and used his personal email account to evade FOIA. Dr. Morens wrote from his personal email account on two separate occasions that, “I learned the tricks last year from an old friend, Marg Moore, who heads our FOIA office and also hates FOIAs” and “i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear.” This email correspondence appears to implicate Ms. Moore in Dr. Morens’ unlawful actions and raises serious questions about her involvement in a potentially larger conspiracy to hide information from the American people.
Morens was stupid enough to write his motivations down, but I would expect that many US government departments run in similar ways.
The term deep state was originally used to speak about Turkey’s military (and the associated power center). That’s what it was coined to describe. There’s political power in the military that’s separated from the democratically legitimated power.
In this case, we did have an administration that had the intention to cut the military budget and audit the Pentagon but the Pentagon was powerful enough to stop that and to instead get their budget increased. It needed a lot more than just inertia and internal politics to accomplish that goal.
I mean, It’s the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. “If you cut our funding then we won’t do X” is enough to put pressure. I’m not saying this is not the case, I’m saying this is… not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you’re elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I’m sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it “deep state”, it’s a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don’t see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It’s not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics—the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who’s supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.
The Pentagon isn’t deep state, it’s just state.
It would be interesting, sure. I can imagine some of these examples being cases of clandestine communication—as in, you want to say something that you know is illegal, you say it off the record in some channel that isn’t monitored. I think it will probably vary case by case when that is the reason though, especially given that if you were doing that you’d still want to use secure channels, just private ones, and some of these instead were ridiculously insecure.
So what do you call Deep State? If you mean just “all the administrative and bureaucratic apparatus has in fact inertia and internal politics and does not immediately swerve at the whim of a new elected official” I say, yeah, no shit, that is true, it has been true throughout all of recorded history in every state entity to ever exist, and even better, it’s a feature, not a bug, as far as I’m concerned. While the downside is that it’ll slow down policies I’d like, it also has a healthy dampening effect against take-over risks. If that wasn’t the case then installing a dictatorship would be a lot easier.
With Clinton’s email server motivations are pretty unclear. If we take Signalgate, using Signal is one choice you can make because you are lazy. Setting the chat to auto-delete after a few weeks is a choice that suggests the intention to avoid the communication becoming a problem later.
From what happened at Fauci’s NIAID:
Morens was stupid enough to write his motivations down, but I would expect that many US government departments run in similar ways.
The term deep state was originally used to speak about Turkey’s military (and the associated power center). That’s what it was coined to describe. There’s political power in the military that’s separated from the democratically legitimated power.
In this case, we did have an administration that had the intention to cut the military budget and audit the Pentagon but the Pentagon was powerful enough to stop that and to instead get their budget increased. It needed a lot more than just inertia and internal politics to accomplish that goal.
I mean, It’s the Pentagon. It obviously has all sorts of leverage, as well as personal connections and influence. “If you cut our funding then we won’t do X” is enough to put pressure. I’m not saying this is not the case, I’m saying this is… not particularly surprising. Like, anyone who thinks that the true challenge of politics is to figure out the precise orders to give once you’re elected, then you can sit back and see your will be enacted as if the entire apparatus of the state was a wish-granting genie is deluded. Obviously the challenge is getting organizations that hold significant power to actually do the thing you want them to.
A leftist would talk about the military-industrial complex, or about corporate lobbying (I’m sure the influence of the various big suppliers also matters, as much and more as that of the Pentagon himself). Again, in this sense, if you want to call it “deep state”, it’s a trivially true thing, and a constant of all polities in history (the military especially! Consider how often personal loyalty of the troops to this or that commander was essentially all that the political stability of a country hinged on). I just don’t see much the usefulness of the concept, and I think the word is misleading. None of this is secret or particularly hidden. It’s not even just a property of the state. You see the same things play out on a small scale in everyday office politics—the CEO wants one thing, but Team A who’s supposed to do it is already busy so they resist it, etc. etc. Organizations at all scales are made of people, people have goals and agency to pursue them. Politics is mostly cat-herding.